About Me

I’m Marie.

I am an Inishowen woman. That is not a small thing for me to say.

I grew up belonging to this landscape long before I had words for what that belonging meant - Atlantic weather, changing light, hedgerows and hills, familiar place names, old stories, and that particular sense of being shaped by where you come from.

It still shapes me now.

I’m a breathwork facilitator, coach and Celtic Wisdom Keeper, and my work moves between a few different worlds: breath and body, science and story, conversation and silence, older knowledge and contemporary practice.

Some of what I do is very practical - functional breathing, breathwork, coaching and one-to-one support.

Some of it follows older threads - Irish language, folklore, plants, story, seasonal traditions and place.

And quite a lot of it begins with curiosity.

Before breathwork, there was teaching

For more than thirty years, I was a primary school teacher in Donegal.

I don’t see that as a separate life that ended when I left the classroom. Teaching formed how I work with people.

It taught me to notice.

To listen for what isn’t being said.

To understand that two people can arrive in exactly the same place needing completely different things.

And perhaps most importantly, it taught me that growth cannot be forced.

You can create the conditions for it. You can offer support, encouragement, structure and time. But you cannot pull at a person like a plant and make them grow more quickly.

That understanding sits underneath everything I offer now.

The person comes before the technique.

Then came the breath

My own searching eventually brought me to breathwork, and from there into a much deeper study of how we breathe and what the breath can tell us.

I have trained in conscious connected breathwork and functional breathing, alongside coaching and other body-based and reflective approaches. I continue to be fascinated by breath physiology, the nervous system and the very practical ways our breathing patterns can affect how we feel and function.

But I have never been particularly interested in collecting techniques simply for the sake of having more techniques.

I want to know what might actually be useful to the person sitting in front of me.

Sometimes that is functional breathing and everyday breath hygiene.

Sometimes it is a deeper breathwork experience.

Sometimes it is rest.

Sometimes we talk.

And sometimes what is most useful is simply having somewhere quiet enough to hear yourself again.

That is why my one-to-one work now has several different doorways rather than one method that everyone is expected to fit.

Marie Doherty Wellness and The Exhale Awakening

My own work through Marie Doherty Wellness has become increasingly personal and one-to-one.

It is where you’ll find my functional breathing work, deeper individual breathwork, coaching and conversation, teacher support, supervision, Celtic-rooted tending, writing and research.

My group work has another home.

I co-founded The Exhale Awakening with Sharyn, and that is where much of our shared breathwork community, group experiences, retreats, gatherings and professional breathwork training now live.

They are connected, but they are not the same thing.

Marie Doherty Wellness is perhaps the quieter path alongside, the place for individual work, study, curiosity and the threads I find myself wanting to follow more deeply.

Following older threads

One of those threads has led me increasingly towards Irish folklore, plants, language, old customs, seasonal knowledge, oral tradition and the people through whom knowledge was carried.

I’m particularly fascinated by the bean feasa, often translated as a woman of knowledge.

For a while I was comfortable using the language of lineage around this work. I’m less comfortable doing that now.

The more I research, the more questions I have.

• Who were these women really?

• What did they know?

• How did they learn it?

• What place did plants, prayer, charms, observation, story, community and lived experience have in that knowing?

• And how much of what we now describe as ancient Celtic wisdom actually belongs to much later folklore, revival movements or contemporary spiritual practice?

Those distinctions matter to me.

So rather than claiming bean feasa as a neat title, I am following it as an enquiry.

One rabbit hole leads to another: a woman such as Peig Sayers, an Irish phrase, a plant growing in the hedge, an old custom, a fragment of folklore, a story attached to a place.

I’m not trying to arrive at the end of it.

I’m learning how to pay better attention.

So what do I mean by Celtic Wisdom Keeper?

I still love this description.

But I don’t use Celtic Wisdom Keeper to suggest that I possess some untouched body of ancient knowledge, or that everything I practise can be traced neatly back through an unbroken Celtic tradition.

For me, keeping means something quieter.

It means tending what has come down to us.

Studying it.

Asking where it came from.

Not flattening folklore, history, spirituality and modern practice into the same thing.

Remembering stories.

Learning the language.

Noticing the plants.

Listening to people and place.

And allowing some things to remain uncertain.

There is care in keeping but there should also be curiosity.

The scientific and the mysterious

This meeting place has become one of my favourite parts of the work.

I can happily disappear into research on breathing physiology and the nervous system, and then find myself equally absorbed by an old Irish charm, a plant story or a fragment of folklore.

I am interested in what can be measured.

I am interested in what people observed and carried long before we had ways of measuring it.

And I am interested in the things that remain a little mysterious.

I don’t need one to prove the other.

Sometimes science and traditional knowledge meet beautifully. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the historical evidence is strong; sometimes all we have is a later story. Sometimes a contemporary practice is simply that - contemporary.

I would rather say so.

Evidence and wonder can sit at the same table.

How I work

You don’t need to know anything about breathwork, Celtic tradition or Irish folklore before working with me.

You don’t need to be spiritual.

You don’t need to arrive knowing what needs to change.

You might come because your breathing has started to concern you.

Because you are exhausted or overwhelmed.

Because teaching or caring for everyone else has left very little room for you.

Because you are standing at some kind of threshold and aren’t quite sure what comes next.

Because you want a deeper breathwork experience.

Or because you simply need somewhere to talk.

We begin with you, rather than with a method.

Breath when breath is useful.

Conversation when conversation is needed.

Rest when the body is asking for rest.

Silence sometimes.

Curiosity almost always.

Tending, not fixing

I’m not interested in turning people into improved versions of themselves.

And I don’t believe every uncomfortable thing needs to be broken through, released or transformed.

Sometimes we have spent long enough pushing.

There are seasons for movement and seasons for stillness. Times for deeper exploration and times when enough has already happened.

Sometimes something needs understanding.

Sometimes it needs company.

Sometimes it needs rest.

Sometimes it simply needs to be noticed.

My work is less about asking,

“How do we fix this?”

and more about wondering,

“What might need tending here?”

And we begin from there.

Go mall agat féin.

Go gently with yourself.